[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/HAYDEN_TUTTON-new-school-picket-line.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tSix months after news broke that the New School was offering voluntary retirement and severance packages to large number of faculty and staff, the New York university has handed out layoff notices to around 15 percent of its employees.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe layoffs, first reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em> on Tuesday, affect 19 full-time faculty members, 10 of whom were tenured, with dozens more taking the early retirement or buyout offers. As part of the restructuring, the school will go from four colleges to two, has discontinued over a dozen academic programs, and paused most doctoral admissions. 30 faculty members were \u201cre-homed\u201d from discontinued programs to other departments. As previously reported in December by the New School Free Press<\/em>, among those programs to be discontinued are its masters in Arts Management and Entreprenuership, while its liberal arts programs at the School of Public Engagement and at the Eugene Lang College will be merged. <\/p>\n \n\tIn a statement to the Chronicle<\/em>, the New School chapter of the American Association of University Professors called the layoffs \u201ca major gutting of our full-time faculty body\u201d and said that some layoffs appeared \u201cto be politically motivated and retaliatory.\u201d <\/p>\n \n\tIn an interview with ARTnews<\/em>, Provost Richard Kessler denied those claims. \u201cThere are people who are in shock, there are people who are angry, there are people who are upset\u2014and of course they would be all of those things,\u201d Kessler said. \u201cAnd so there are people who are searching for ulterior motives, who are looking for reasons that are beyond what we\u2019ve expressed. And we\u2019ve expressed significant reasons, including a university that had been running a $50 million [annual] deficit and $160 million accumulated deficit that it could not continue. We have 20 percent fewer students than we had at our peak in 2021, and we just don\u2019t have the resources to continue a workforce that\u2019s 20 percent larger than what we need.\u201d\u00a0(The school\u2019s annual deficit has been previously reported as $48 million.)<\/p>\n \n\tSince December, the university has framed the restructuring and staff reductions as a painful but necessary move to address a significant budget deficit as it faces declining enrollment and threats from the Trump Administration. Kessler said much the same Thursday, telling ARTnews <\/em>that the school is disproprotionately affected by attacks and restrictions on international students, which made up 40 percent of the student body in 2023, according to a New York Times<\/em> analysis. That placed it with the fifth highest percentage among four-year colleges and universities in the US.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAt any given moment, will the federal government decide no immigrants can come in, no students can come in from any country? There\u2019s an X factor to this,\u201d said Kessler. \u201cWe\u2019ve been living through a political and global situation where things are occurring that we never imagined would occur.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAs per whether the restructuring and cuts will actually close the university\u2019s budget deficit, Kessler siad he is \u201csuper confident,\u201d adding that the restructuring will make the school \u201cmore nimble,\u201d \u201cmore dynamic,\u201d and better able to respond to shifting enrollment patterns, citing investment in high-performing programs like the College of Performing Arts.<\/p>\n \n\tAmong the school\u2019s graduates are many important figures in the visual arts, including Nina Chanel Abney, Richard Avedon, Adolph Gottlieb, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Ryan McGinley, Rob Pruitt, Norman Rockwell, and Ai Weiwei. Fashion designers Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Jenna Lyons, Anna Sui, and Alexander Wang are also graduates, as were writers James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Jack Kerouac, and Tennessee Williams.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe New School\u2019s AAUP chapter has claimed that among the professors laid off this week were several who never recieved a buyout offer or were from programs set for closure, and thus catching them off guard. Kessler said that the school has repeatedly communicated with faculty, staff, and students over the issues, and the steps the university planned to take. When voluntary separation packages were offered late last year, he added, he and other university officials conveyed that \u201cinvoluntary separation packages\u201d\u2014i.e. layoffs\u2014were likely to follow in 2026.<\/p>\n \n\tIn December, students, faculty, and staff protested the cuts outside the school, demanding that the school rescind voluntary separation package agreements, institute a $200,000 salary cap, call a meeting between the board and students, faculty, and staff. <\/p>\n \n\tIn a statement, ACT-UAW Local 7902, the union for part-time faculty at the school, said it did not recieve the voluntary separation emails, but has experienced program closures and course cancellations.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWe were also asked to voluntarily give up our 10% retirement contributions for up to 18 months, in line with the involuntary cessation of retirement benefits forced upon full-time faculty and staff,\u201d the union\u2019s Annie Lee Larson told ARTnews<\/em> in an email.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/new-school-lays-off-15-percent-of-staff-and-faculty-1234788357\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/HAYDEN_TUTTON-new-school-picket-line.jpg?w=1024″] Six months after news broke that the New School was offering voluntary retirement and severance packages to large number of faculty and staff, the New York university has handed out layoff notices to around 15 percent of its employees. The layoffs, first reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education on Tuesday, affect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1972981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1972981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1972981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1972981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1972981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}